Jazz Articles about Kenny Dorham

About Kenny Dorham

Album Review

Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited

Read "Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited" reviewed by Maurizio Zerbo

by Maurizio Zerbo
March 31, 2025

Le linee guida di Fontainebleau e Magic Touch, i due capolavori di Tadd Dameron qui riuniti in un solo CD, furono teorizzate dal pianista di Cleveland sulle pagine della rivista Record Changer, in cui descrisse come la sua adesione all'estetica del bebop fosse mediata dalla classica scrittura swing. Le forme multitematiche ABA e i trasporti di chorus di “The Scene Is Clean," nonché i quattro movimenti di “Fontainebleau" che non contengono una sola nota improvvisata, forniscono prove tangibili ...

Album Review

Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited

Read "Fontainebleau & Magic Touch Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
October 27, 2024

There is much that is tragic about Tadd Dameron's story. The composer, arranger and pianist fell prey to the heroin epidemic that gripped New York's jazz world in the 1940s and 1950s. He did jail time for his addiction in 1959-60. He died at the woefully young age of 48 years in 1965. But there is nothing tragic about Dameron's legacy as a composer-arranger, the field in which he made his most important contribution to jazz. His work was unfailingly ...

Album Review

Thelonious Monk: Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings Revisited

Read "Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings Revisited" reviewed by Stefano Merighi

by Stefano Merighi
September 30, 2024

Affrontare oggi queste pagine monkiane significa non solo riconsiderare l'importanza cruciale di un repertorio senza tempo, ma provare proprio un'ebbrezza dell'ascolto difficilmente eguagliabile. Thelonious Monk marchia a fuoco con la sua personalità tutta un'epoca del jazz che è quella rivoluzionaria del bebop--nonché quella “riformista" dell'hard bop--e stabilisce molte delle coordinate che ispirano la migliore musica africana-americana di oggi, sia di orientamento free che di stampo armonico progressive. In questo caso, la collana ezz-thetics realizza un'operazione davvero interessante, assemblando ...

Album Review

Kenny Dorham: From 'Round Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia To Matador Revisited

Read "From 'Round Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia To Matador Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
June 5, 2024

In his mostly sane and admirable book Black Nationalism and the Revolution In Music (Pathfinder Press, 1970), Frank Kofsky describes Kenny Dorham as “house trained." The calculated insult attempts to conflate Dorham's respect for form and structure with an Uncle Tom outlook on the world. Some might say Dorham would have been justified in following (or, rather, anticipating) the example of the writer Stanley Crouch, who on spotting in a Manhattan restaurant a critic who had recently dissed one of ...

Album Review

Thelonious Monk: Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings Revisited

Read "Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
October 26, 2022

Another stone resurrection from the Swiss-based ezz-thetics label, Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings Revisited collects 23 of the tracks Thelonious Monk recorded for Blue Note between 1947 and 1952, remastered by ezzthetics' sonic jedi Michael Brändli at Hardstudios in Winterthur. Situated north of Zurich, Winterthur is Switzerland's equivalent of Silicon Valley and Hardstudios looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. The audio quality Brändli achieves there for ezz-thetics' has been raved about many times on these pages. ...

Album Review

Joe Henderson: The Complete Joe Henderson Blue Note Studio Sessions

Read "The Complete Joe Henderson Blue Note Studio Sessions" reviewed by Scott Gudell

by Scott Gudell
November 22, 2021

If an artist stamps his jazz passport with any one of these labels--Blue Note, Verve, Milestone--it's pretty much a guarantee that you've arrived in style. Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson has traveled with all three and more. The 2021 reissue from the prestigious Mosaic Records focuses on Henderson's 1960s tenure with Blue Note offers a new opportunity to experience an abundance of rich and creative jazz from the decade. Big band and bop were duking it out in the ...

Album Review

Charlie Parker: Be Bop Live

Read "Be Bop Live" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 6, 2021

The name of the record label is ezz-thetics, which was also a composition by George Russell and an album of the same name (which featured Eric Dolphy) released by Riverside Records in 1961. Maybe a better moniker for the label is “Lest We Forget." Not that we could ever abandon Charlie Parker, but today when streaming services replace CDs and LPs, which also replaced 78s and live radio broadcasts (the streaming service of its day), Parker has the possibility of ...